The UK's crime and policing minister has blamed "human error" for the erasure of hundreds of thousands of DNA records and other data on criminal suspects from the national police computer.

Kit Malthouse told the House of Commons that the mishap occurred during a "regular housekeeping process" on the computer, which holds 13 million records. He said around 400,000 records were wiped, including 213,000 offense records and 170,000 arrest records.

"Clearly this situation is very serious," Malthouse said, adding that "we will know the full extent of the impact of this issue over the next few days."

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Opposition Labour Party lawmaker, Yvette Cooper, said it was "very hard to understand how 400,000 records could be deleted from such a crucial system without there being a proper back-up system in place."

Labour leader, Keir Starmer, formerly head of the UK's prosecution service, called on Home Secretary Priti Patel to "take responsibility" for the matter. 

Patel said that Home Office engineers worked over the weekend to restore the data lost from the Police National Computer (PNC). But Malthouse said he could not guarantee that no criminal investigations would be harmed by the error, adding that the government was working "to make sure that any operational impact is obviated or mitigated."

The PNC, which stores and shares criminal records, is used in active police investigations providing real-time checks on people, vehicles and outstanding arrest warrants. 

The code, which led to the deletions, was introduced in November 2020. Initially it was reported that around 150,000 records were lost, but that number has since risen.